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August142013

23:02

There's a documentary about the amazing Rae Spoon coming out. The soundtrack is being released as a new album too – regrettably leaving behind the electronics of the last two though. If you're intrigued, go for this one first.

October182011

Radical Face ("Mountains") live in San Francisco, recorded by Connor Ellmann

Ooooh, so pretty – this sets new standards for amateur(ish) concert recordings.

The artist is amazing – both in this incarnation and as one of his other projects: Electric President.

He occupied two spots on my best of 2010 mixtape (budget of that linked video: $150). The above is a song from an epic in-progress self-released three-album collection of songs set around "a fictional family tree ranging from around 1800 to 1950, cobbled together from genealogy charts and personal experiences and stories I've read" that he worked on for the last few years, fighting his label to retain the creative freedom to follow through with this hardly-marketable concept.

He goes on "no clubs" tours playing people's backyards and "odd locations" only, collaborates with local choral groups for performances (like the one in this video), records humble tutorials on how to play his songs and just generally seems to be an all-around good person with a wonderful voice and great songwriting skills.

March132011

O Superman is a 1981 song by experimental performance artist and musician Laurie Anderson. The half-sung, half-spoken, almost minimalist piece unexpectedly rose to #2 on the UK Singles Charts. (via donaufestival)

March012011

A terrifyingly high number of people I like are going through rough times right now. At a loss on how to help when rational arguments didn't seem to be of much use, I tried making a mixtape of songs that I personally draw hope and strength from for one particular friend.

The much less important technical aspect:So I made a playlist, but now what? Do I burn a CD, which I haven't done in years? Do I just throw a zip file up on RapidShare? While pondering what the modern equivalent of a mixtape could be like, I noticed that almost all songs were on YouTube (a mixture of official music videos, live concert recordings and mp3 uploads accompanying static images). But YouTube's playlist function felt too impersonal as well, and provided no way of including the lyrics, which were very important to me.

So I built this little playlist script that takes a YouTube URL and a SubViewer subtitle file (that I created using an online tool) for each track and formats them into an autoplaying playlist with synchronized lyrics, adding a bunch of flashy CSS3 effects – that some browsers will probably be unable to render.

I'm not naive enough to think this solves any problems, but if a single person out there finds even the tiniest bit of comfort from this, it'll have been worth the effort. To B. and everyone else: You're not alone with what you're going through. Please don't rob yourself of your future.

January132011

My Last.fm Gender Plot: I listen to more stereotypically female than male music, I'm older than most people listening to what I listen to, Dälek is the most macho artist I like and Patrick, Mirah, Kimya and The Blow are hanging out in a queer little group of their own all the way down at the femme edge of the graph (presumably eyeing Jónsi [edit: and even Dear Nora!] suspiciously over there in gender-balanced territory).